For the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring the capabilities of Dell OpenManage software. This post is about OpenManage Server Administrator. The install did not go 100% smoothly, so I decided to do a write up about my installation due to the large amount of chatter on online forums regarding this topic.

There are 2 ways to install the OMSA 6.5 VIB: through the ESXi service console, or remotely via vSphere CLI.

When launched, the program opens in your default web browser. Now you can log in using the IP address and root username and password of you ESXi 4.1 system. You may need to check the “Ignore Certificate Warnings” check box.If your login is unsuccessful, see the troubleshooting section at the bottom of this post. The OMSA start page looks like this:

Once I was in, my home page looked like this:

On the left pane you can expand the categories and check hardware, software, and storage info. In the storage category, you can get access to your RAID controllers. Some of the items in contain tasks:

For more information on OMSA’s capabilities with ESXi, Dell has published this useful document:

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator is a useful tool for monitoring the health of your servers. In addition to monitoring, it gives the ability to perform storage related tasks. The install is relatively simple and once installed it worked effectively without any issues. I would certainly recommend checking it out if you are looking for a tool that grants RAID access and an array of hardware monitoring utilities.

Troubleshooting

If you’re having trouble connecting to your ESXi server, you may need to start the OpenManage service (wsman). Try these steps in a putty session to your ESXi system:

Thanks so much for this guide. Really well written – great looking page as well – and exactly the information I needed. I really loved the screen shot of the messages that scroll as the initial install takes place. Great for relieving anxiety…
C